Facebook is testing out a new feature for its Android mobile app called “Photo Syncing”. The feature automatically backs up your smartphone’s photographs by uploading them to Facebook as they’re shot, tucking them away inside a private “Synced from Phone” tab on your photos page that isn’t visible to anyone but you. You can then later choose which photos you’d like to make private and which you’d simply like for Facebook to hold on to. Read more…
As people snap more and more digital photos, being able to organize those photos into useful sets is becoming increasingly important. Facial recognition algorithms are quickly becoming a standard feature in popular photo origination programs (e.g. iPhoto), but people-sorting is only the tip of the “semantic photo search” iceberg. Cloud photo service EverPix is one company that’s currently working to take photo recognition beyond faces. Sarah Perez of TechCrunch writes,
[...] the eventual goal for Everpix is to become the default way people choose to view and share photos. One development which could help it get there is the image analysis technology the company has been developing in-house. As people’s photo collections grow exponentially over the years, it’s something that will become more valuable in time. Using generalized semantic tagging techniques, Everpix is building algorithms that can identify what the photo is of – meaning, whether it’s a person, a night or day shot, a wide or close shot, a city scene, a nature photo, a photo of a baby, or a vehicle, or a photo of food, among many other things.
What’s important here is that the way they’ve built this to scale. After training the system on a minimal amount of photos, Everpix can then look for other photos in a user’s collection that match that signature without reprocessing the entire photo collection.
In the future, we’ll likely be able to search for photos with photos. Looking for a particular photo that you took at a popular tourist landmark? Just show the app a similar photo found online, and voilà, yours appears.
Samsung’s new Galaxy Camera will be the first point-and-shoot to which you can add a 3G or 4G data plan when it arrives on store shelves in October. One of the major benefits of being connected to the Internet all the time is that the camera will be able to take full advantage of cloud-based services. Services like Dropbox.
Samsung confirmed today that customers who purchase a Galaxy camera will automatically receive a free 50GB Dropbox cloud storage account — the same perk currently offered to some Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone buyers. Read more…
The worlds of digital photography and cloud storage have been colliding as of late, with industry players such as Adobe and Apple coming out with services (Revel and Photo Stream, respectively) that synchronize your photo collections with the cloud.
Mosaic View is one of the newest entries in this increasingly crowded space, offering a product specifically geared for Adobe Lightroom. Launched a couple weeks ago, the desktop and mobile app allows photographers to carry their Lightroom catalogs with them wherever they go. Read more…
File hosting powerhouse Dropbox has added automatic camera uploads to its iOS app — a feature that Android users have enjoyed for some time now. In addition to backing up your photos in the cloud, the company is offering a new gallery view for browsing photos and 3GB of additional free space if you upload 3GB in photos (or videos).
The ability to connect your camera to your smartphone wirelessly is starting to really gather some steam. Unfortunately, up until now, that technology usually required a WiFi connection and an adapter that often cost some serious dinero. But if all you’re looking to do is share the photos you take instantly sans WiFi network, you don’t have many options. Enter CloudPic Mobile. Read more…
Adobe’s cloud-based subscription program, called Creative Cloud, now has a price tag: $50/month with a minimum one-year agreement. Subscribing will get you access to the latest version of Adobe’s popular programs (e.g. CS6 and Lightroom 4) without the pain of shelling out big bucks for buying the boxed version and subsequent upgrades. In addition to receiving updates to the programs as soon as they’re released, you’ll also be given 20GB of cloud storage that can be used for syncing your work.
Apple’s doing it. Adobe’s doing it. Now Dropbox wants in. An upcoming version of the company’s popular cloud storage client will include a new photo importer feature that will automatically backup your photos whenever you connect a memory card, smartphone, or camera to your computer. You can try it out now by downloading the experimental build from this forum thread. Be sure to read the instructions to make sure you have a system that supports the feature.
Everpix is a new company that wants to make your entire photo collection — both online and offline — accessible from anywhere through the cloud. Introduced yesterday at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 conference, the service will come as a desktop client that monitors folders on your computer and photo sharing accounts on the Internet. Whenever you add new photographs, they’re automatically beamed to the cloud (i.e. Everpix servers), allowing images created using many different devices and stored in many different places to be available in one central location. Even photos emailed to your through Gmail can be picked up and back up by the service. Read more…
Adobe announced a new cloud-based photo storage and sharing service today called Carousel, which will let you store all your photos at a central location, making it easy to view, share, and edit them — using a Lightroom/ACR-based engine — on any device you own. It’ll only be available for Apple users in the beginning (e.g. Macs, iPhone, iPad), but Android and Windows versions are in the works. The service will cost $9.99/month or $99/year, and the free apps will be released later this month.
